Large Text

By Matthew Ford

In June 1989, Electron User published two programs to print out large banners on paper. One of these used the Electron's built-in character set and the other supplied its own, using DATA statements. I have rewritten most of the latter program, keeping the data from the original, to print messages on the screen instead.

Run the program and you will be asked to enter your message. This can only contain capital letters, and some punctuations symbols. (No lower case letters or numbers.) If you enter a symbol that the program does not recognise, you will hear a beep.

Next enter the position of the top-left corner of the message, in graphics coordinates (These run from 0 to 1279 from left to right and from 0 to 1023 from bottom to top). The width and height of the message should also be in graphics coordinates.

You will also be asked for the gap between the letters, in Mode 4 pixels. 8 pixels is usually about right (1 character cell).

If you want to produce a message which is more than one line long, build it up one line at a time using the LOAD/SAVE facility. When asked for the LOAD filename, enter the filename you used for the SAVE filename last time you ran the program, or press RETURN to start with a blank screen. Similarly, when asked for the SAVE filename, just press RETURN if you don't want to SAVE the result.

To LOAD the screens back into the computer, use:

>MODE 4 (RETURN)
>*LOAD filename 5800

You may want to use these large messages to create autostereograms. See my separate documentation on autostereograms for how to do this. They may also be useful in title screens for games or headings for documents, etc, etc.